Psychotic Cinema

Genre: Drive-in psycho slasher exploitation

In between writing for children’s TV shows, such as Lidsville, New Zoo Revue or The New Mickey Mouse Club, Marc B. Ray wrote, produced and directed something far different. Scream Bloody Murder is a low budget horror slasher movie about a crazed psychopath on the loose.

The film opens in a field with a young blonde haired boy, Matthew, purposely driving a bulldozer over his father. While the vehicle is still moving, the boy jumps off and falls beside the vehicle resulting in one of the caterpillar tracks running over his hand.

We jump ahead in time to the boy, who has now grown up to be a young man (Fred Holbert) with an artificial hook now replacing the hand which was crushed by the caterpillar tracks. Amazingly this fruitcake has just been discharged from the mental hospital and has returned to his farm.

He instantly takes a dislike to his new step-father and kills him with an axe. Comforting his distressed mother, Matthew tells her he did it to save her and in the kerfuffle that follows, throws her to the ground and accidentally kills her - all this in the first eleven minutes of the film.

This sexually impotent psycho then goes on a killing spree across the country, deliriously trying to protect women while killing them and their partners and all the while hallucinating trippy images of his dead mother.
Eventually he meets a kind prostitute (Leigh Mitchell), who paints an horrendously bad painting which a three year old could have done better. Matthew befriends her and she seems very excepting of this creep.
In the meantime to show his love for her he kills one of her johns.

Trying to impress her, he gets into the home of a wealthy old lady, kills the old lady, her black maid and the dog, which for some reason is shown as a freeze frame standing in the middle of the room and then drives back the old lady's vintage luxury car to collect the prostitute.

He takes the prostitute back to the house, telling her that this is where he lives and keeps her tied up as a prisoner.
The second half of this movie has the demented Matthew psycho-babbling to the girl, trying to get her to paint more pictures and coming out with lines like:

“See what I do for you - I get groceries, clothes and art stuff - and I kill people.”

Will she escape the clutches (or hook) of this mad psychopath?

I actually quite enjoyed this movie – yes, it’s corny and low-budget, but Fred Holbert who plays Matthew was quite good and I was surprised he doesn’t seem to have made any other movies. Also, watch out for Angus Scrimm in an early role.

This movie is classic drive-in material where the viewer would either be stoned, drunk, necking with a date or all three.

Scream Bloody Murder (1973)